About the Department

Eric Beerbohm is Frederick S. Danzinger Associate Professor of Government and the Committee on Social Studies at Harvard University and Director of Graduate Fellowships at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. His philosophical and teaching interests include democratic theory, theories of distributive justice, and the philosophy of social science.  He is currently working on an account of democratic lawmaking addressed to legislators who find themselves in conditions that are unjust, corrupt, or collectively irrational. The project is an attempt to identify principles that bear upon political compromise, legislative leadership, and the limits of obstructionism. His book, In Our Name: The Ethics of Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2012), considers the responsibilities of citizens for the actions of their state.   He has also written on the implications of moral uncertainty for political decision-making, the demandingness of deliberative democracy, and the moral risks imposed by anti-egalitarian social policies. A Marshall Scholar and Mellon Fellow in the Humanities and Social Sciences, he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2008, B.Phil. in Philosophy from Oxford University, and BA in Political Science and the Program in Ethics in Society from Stanford University. He was a Faculty Fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics in 2008-2009. He is a recipient of the 2012 Roslyn Abramson Award, given annually to two Harvard faculty in Arts and Sciences for "excellence and sensitivity in undergraduate teaching."